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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Why would they do that? It seems like disabling IMAP would drive away huge numbers of users and give their competition more advantage.

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Just as they would never turn off Jabber support in Google Talk, right?

Jabber support, in the sense of any client being able to connect to google talk, is perfectly active, hell I've got it open on my desktop right now.

Federation, the ability for having your own jabber network contactable by google talk users and vice-versa, that was (partially) turned off, after a string of spam abuses.

IIRC, using XMPP is going through the legacy "Google Talk" infrastructure which they want to axe in favor of Google+ Hangouts.

They actually temporarily broke Jabber support and then put it back on when people freaked out. I have noticed though that when I have hangouts conversations they don't seem to make it to my Jabber client...

They are probably going to scrap Google Talk. Even now you can't participate in group chats on Hangouts over XMPP which is hugely annoying.

which has drove away tons of users!

at least for google apps for bussiness, IMAP is a must.

No, not the same. Some of my least technical friends use imap without knowing they're using imap. Ask them about Jabber and their response would be "What??" which is why it got axed.

Killing imap would cause 60-year-olds I know to complain at the same time that we would complain. You can't have that broad spectrum complaint. As much fuss as there was over whatever that RSS thing was, I signed up and used it for 6 months and then forgot it existed.

In short: Let's put to bed the idea that Google is arbitrary, they're not. If they look at the numbers and see people not really using the product, they take it out back and put a hollow point through its head. (This is also why I'm bullish about Google Plus...they would have killed it otherwise.)

"Some of my least technical friends use imap without knowing they're using imap. Ask them about Jabber and their response would be "What??" which is why it got axed."

Ask them about IMAP and their response would be "What??". Your point doesn't support itself.

Sorry, no that wasn't clear now that I look at it.

I tried to type out another paragraph but it was equally as bad. Here is another shot at what I'm trying to get at: They're not the same because I'm willing to bet there are orders of magnitude more users using imap than there were technical people who used and cared about Jabber. Even as a technical person, I hadn't realized Google had removed it and I'm someone who previously used it. And I'm in the small group, not the general public, but I know several people off the top of my head that aren't technical and myself that use imap on a daily basis.

Ignorant considering we have no idea how Google plans to make its money in the future or even now. The older services that were created to make people think it was really cool, just create problems for Google because they were made using open protocols that don't conform to Google's new lock-in strategy. Non of this is "spring cleaning" or "just running the numbers" kind of stuff. Its more like herding cattle based on some strategy that involves location data, driver-less cars, robot/machine learning, all its users data and god only knows what else in order to do god knows what.

"disabling IMAP would drive away huge numbers of users" -- Why? Ask 10 random people on the street in any large American city if they've ever heard of Gmail, and then if they have ever heard of IMAP. Fair chance the numbers will be something like 8 and (maybe) 1 on average.

On the other hand, disabling IMAP will make sure that people have to look at the webapp, and tie into the Google ecosystem to read their mail. Looking forward five more years, you might even have to have a Google+ account to read your email.

ask people if they use Apple Maik (on iPhone too) and that drastically changes

Possibly there might be obvious technical hurdles I'm missing here, but why wouldn't Google just release a Gmail app for the iPhone?

They already did, but many people are satisfied with the Apple app and wouldn't appreciate being forced to switch to a different and not-meaningfully-better app.

You got it. For me, I like getting my personal and work emails pushed to my iPhone in the same place (the Mail app). Though I have the Gmail app I don't use it.

I only keep the gmail app around for search, because the way gmail or iphone Mail.app implement IMAP search is not so good.

Just because they don't know what the acronym is doesn't mean they don't use it. Ask if they read the mail sent to their gmail address through outlook or the mail app on their iphone.

Because of iphone.

Wouldn't Google just release a "Gmail" app for the iPhone / Windows Phone?

There already is one.

Not for Windows Phone there isn't, and they probably won't release one.

Or they could forward all their Google email to another email provider that does offer IMAP.

I'd certainly leave immediately.

Why haven't you already?

Because it's a hassle and it's easier to keep using it so far, and the alternatives aren't as nice in other ways. It's going to be a bigger pain to do it once I'm forced to, but…

I haven't left because:

(1) I don't have a server where I can run my own mail infrastructure -- I don't think my ISP would be happy with me running a mail server off my cable modem). And

(2) I don't trust Outlook.com not to silently discard mail from randomly selected senders (as I believe Hotmail was known to do). Gmail is reliable.

But otherwise, I'm ready. I've already stopped using the Gmail web interface (retaliation for killing Google Reader). And once I'm no longer tied to Gmail anymore, I can switch to a better IMAP client than Thunderbird.

Have you tried Fastmail? I switched to them a while ago and haven't looked back. Their web UI isn't as nice, but they have an honest business model with a much better privacy policy and migrating is pretty straightforward.

Another anecdote here -- I also use them and like the service.

Their web UI isn't as nice,

I like their web UI better than GMail. It is cleaner than GMail and much faster most of the time. It's also worth noting that they now have a beta version of a calendar (with CalDAV) support:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2014/01/23/calendar-now-available-on...

And they are apparently working on CardDAV.

I have a fastmail account, it is worse than gmail in these respects:

- the spam filter is not very effective. I have marked as spam a certain kind of spammy newsletters many times but they still come throught.

- No calendar or contacts you can sync to your phone.

In all fairness, every mail server discards mail from some senders. Your junk folder would explode if everything got through.

Hopefully they reject this mail, not simply discard it.

I'm not him, but I'm in the same situation: I currently use Gmail almost exclusively through IMAP, and I'd jump ship instantaneously if they turned it off.

Why haven't I left already? Because it works fine and does everything I need.

Why would I leave? The way you ask, you seem to think it's obvious, but I have no idea.

Yeah if IMAP access goes on Gmail that would be it for me.

I'd probably bounce back to hosting my own IMAP and using some utility to download my Gmail to it with Push or whatever protocol (HTTP?) that Gmail uses for push.

It would be nice to have Sieve scripts again to filter my mail (Gmail's filtering leaves much to be desired).

Huge numbers of users who are not using the web interface/mobile app and are not seeing the ads. Those might as well not exist.

Google still gets to mine all the email they receive for data, and if they use the same Google account (or maybe IP address) for anything else, use it to target the ads there. It also brings network effects, since you don't have to convince the user to sign up for a new Google account for some other Google service if they already have one for gmail.

Sure, it has some benefits. But if it can help push 60% of them to the Gmail app, if might be worth it to Google, even if it's to lose 40%.

And I seriously doubt it will lose 40% even. It's not like people have many decent options for webmail + mobile mail, especially if you exclude paying for it.

And what about paying customers for hosted domains?

What about them? They're paying for the web mail service, not IMAP specifically. And their "terms of use" probably already cover that Google can do whatever it likes to the service.

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